Audrey Jean Palmer

December 17, 1935 – January 7, 2023

Audrey grew up in a small house that looked across Lake Union to the Seattle skyline when the Space Needle was tall.  Her dad, Roy Ward, was a tugboat captain for Pioneer Gravel, so some summers she spent dressing paperdolls on his tugboat, which made trips between Seattle and Alaska, hauling gravel to build the University and Tacoma Narrows bridges.

Both of Audrey’s parents, Myrtle Louise Grossman Ward and Roy S. Ward, were raised on farms on McNeil Island, where Roy ferried prisoners and wardens between the state penitentiary and the mainland.  The Grossmans and the Wards are Washington State “pioneer” families who settled in Washington before 1900.

Audrey and her brother Harold (Gig Harbor) graduated in 1952 from Lincoln High School, as Audrey skipped two grades.

At the University of Washington studying for her bachelor’s degree in education, Audrey worked at the library and joined Phrateres, a social and service club for female students who lived at home while in college.  The Phrateres had a dedicated room at the Hub for storing their belongings and brown bag lunches, and the members became friends for life.

After college, Audrey and one of her Phrateres classmates, Mary Jane Steele, traveled to New York City to study for a summer at Columbia’s Teacher’s College, where they had the summer of their lives, visiting Coney Island, having dinner at the Waldorf Astoria’s Starlight Room, and going up the Empire State building.  In 1958, before Hawaii became a state, Audrey toured the Hawaiian islands with her soon-to-be sister-in-law, Roberta McCormick.

In June 1959, Audrey married Jack W. Palmer, a UW graduate and officer in the Air Force Reserves.  According to the letter Jack wrote Audrey while she was traveling in Hawaii, he was almost as excited about their upcoming nuptials as he was his new boat.  Indeed, until he was diagnosed with mesothelioma in 1992, Jack would always own a boat, and Jack and Audrey and later their children would spend many warm summer evenings waterskiing and eating buckets of Kentucky Fried chicken on Lake Washington.

Audrey spent almost her entire 40-year career in room 12 at Laurelhurst Elementary school, teaching fourth and fifth graders.  She especially loved science, collecting rocks to share with her students and, for several years, coordinating with the Woodland Park Zoo to bring animals, including a barn owl and a baby raccoon, into the classroom.   Her classroom had a piano, on which Audrey could play anything you could hum.  Every year she helped out at Laurelhurst drama productions, playing piano and sewing elaborate costumes.  She delighted in creating fanciful Halloween costumes to wear to school, too, including the memorable time she dressed as a kitchen, with, for a hat, a colander dripping wooden spoons.  Well into her eighties, after multiple strokes and the onset of vascular dementia, Audrey would entertain the other assisted living residents by picking out “This Land is Your Land” and “How Much is that Doggie in the Window?” on the piano.

After teaching, Audrey could usually be found gardening, weeding her rhododendrons and azaleas or tending to the zucchini and raspberries in her gigantic vegetable garden in the backyard.  Like her mother, she had not just one but two green thumbs.

Audrey always had several cats and at least one dog, usually rescues, including a series of adorable, noisy, beagles.  She befriended the neighborhood animals as well, including Walter, a crow who stopped by daily for stale bread treats, and a squirrel whom she kept supplied with peanuts.  She was a big supporter of Pasado’s Safe Haven sanctuary for animals, and she insisted on feeding French fries to the pigeons at Dick’s.

Audrey knew all of her neighbors on 104^th street in Wedgwood and enjoyed participating in block parties and having visitors, especially the twins who lived up the street.  When her house was sold a few years ago, the new owners asked for the names of the landscape architect and the gardener.  That would be Audrey and Jack.

Jack and Audrey were active parishioners at Lake City Presbyterian Church, where they developed another network of close, lifelong friends.  They also enjoyed camping on Whidbey Island with Harold’s family, bowling, and skiing, although Audrey’s downhill skiing technique entailed long traverses across the mountain rather than down the hill.  Jack and Audrey also enjoyed traveling, mostly with car and trailer to Western states but also to North Carolina and Alaska, to see Mark at his Coast Guard postings, and to Baltimore to visit Jack’s family.

After Jack’s death, Audrey traveled with family and friends, going to Alaska, Mexico, Scotland, Ireland, England, and Italy with Lisa; taking cruises with friends; and taking Grand Tours with Mark’s Katie and Kyle (New Mexico), Katie (Africa), Kyle (Italy), Kurtis (Australia); and Lisa’s Jessica (North Dakota), and Alexandra (Costa Rica).  In more recent years, she joined Lisa and her granddaughters Alex, Jessica, and Anna on trips to Yosemite, the Oregon Coast, Victoria B.C., and, most memorably, Iceland, where her granddaughters had to hold on to her so she didn’t float away in the Blue Lagoon.  At home, Audrey dearly loved spending time with her rambunctious youngest grandson, Lori’s Trace, as well as her nieces (Connie, Cheryl, Carla, and Karen) and nephew (Doug), and their children and grandchildren, perhaps especially her namesake, Karen’s Heather’s daughter Audrey.

Audrey passed away in her sleep on January 7^th, 2023, thirty years almost to the day after the passing of her beloved Jack.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks for donations to Audrey’s favorite animal rescue, Pasado’s Safe Haven, pasadosafehaven.org.